TRAVELS WITH MY HAT MEDIA COVERAGE

Life in pictures: Christine with her mother in Termora during a recent trip home. Source: Supplied

Facing it: Christine Osborne getting her face painted by the Masai, Kenya 1976. Source:Supplied

LONG before TripAdvisor, free hotel internet and Facebook status updates, Christine Osborne was a travel journalist at the farthest reaches of the earth.

Often called upon to write guide guidebooks and freelance stories on the most of exotic of locations — Morocco, Pakistan, Iraq, Ethiopia and Egypt among them — the young woman from Temora, in the NSW Riverina, spent weeks and months out of touch and out of reach, save but for a few letters home to her mother when postal services allowed it. No mobile phones, no maps and — OMG — no social messaging.

This was travel journalism of the kind that no longer exists, where publications would pay a decent rate for a photo that was captured, not by a dozen iPhones held aloft, but the lone photojournalist registering a moment in history. “At the time I never considered myself an adventurer, but I suppose when I look back at my life and put it in to context, that is what I was,” says 70-year-old Christine from her “current home” in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney.

“I never felt like what I was doing was risky either. I remember one English travel journalist remarking that he couldn’t believe that I just get up and go to these places by myself, but once I set my mind to something I get it done.

“I just did what I had to do until maybe I got arrested.”

Christine had another reason for making a successful career out of her four decades of overseas travel: she had turned her back on the nursing career she had trained so hard for in Sydney, and was determined to make her travel writing work.

“I come from a medical family but I realised pretty quickly I didn’t want to be a nurse, I wanted to see the world and becoming a travel writer was a way for me to do this and have a career,” says Christine, who is fluent in French.

In a way, too, she had something to prove. Her classmates in Temora laughed at her when she announced she wanted to see the world, but she was undeterred. “I managed to escape my childhood by borrowing books from the library about the Greek islands, Tahiti and Africa,” she says.

“But I made sure I had something to fall back on in nursing first; I think it is absolutely critical young people who want to travel make sure they have an education or a trade they can rely on if they need to.”

Christine’s career did not disappoint. She set off for the world in 1963, and — using London as her base — was soon selling her work and her photographs internationally. Publication of her The Gulf States & Oman was well-reviewed, and in 1979 she was commissioned to cover Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s historic tour of Arabia. The foreword to Christine’s second book, An Insight and Guide to Jordan, was written by Queen Nour, the fourth wife of HM King Hussein, and Christine wrote 14 more books on her travels, including works on Thailand, Malaysia, Oman, the Seychelles, Pakistan and Morocco. The tens of thousands of photographs taken during her travels throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East, became a major source of her income, and she founded the World Religions Photo Library in 1990. Most of her writing work was academic and research-based, commissioned specifically for guide book editors, but her 15th, and most recent work, Travels with My Hat, marks a departure.

It is a memoir of Christine’s lifetime on the road (the title refers to a blue hat she was oft seen wearing), and called for a much more personal style of writing that Christine found difficult at times. “Most people say I am a very private person, and I spend a lot of time by myself, so it was hard to talk about myself all the time in the book,” she says.

In 2006 during the global financial crisis, Christine sold her London flat to return to Australia, but admits it took her three or four years to really settle in. And she still isn’t sure if she has.

“I want to go to Somalia one day that is on my list,” she says.

“But honestly I have been too busy with the book and I haven’t had time to explore the next place, but I am looking and listening the whole time.”

Wherever her next plane ticket takes her, Christine is sure to spend the first few hours at her new destination scanning the local “For Sale” signs in the real estate agents’ windows.

“I do that wherever I go,” she reflects. “It’s like searching for a place or a home where all the pieces fit together; for instance, I would really like to be closer to the sea.

“But that, of course, is ridiculous because that place doesn’t exist.”

Frequent Flyer: Christine Osborne

Date: April 5, 2014

JANE REDDY

Christine Osborne.

Christine Osborne, writer and photographer in the Middle East, Africa and south Asia for more than 40 years.

HOTEL

Some personal favourites are the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur, the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, where Agatha Christie penned Death on the Nile, and Faletti's in Lahore, home for Ava Gardner when she was filming Bhowani Junction in 1956.

AIRLINE

Korean Air is my preference for the long trip to London. Day flight from Sydney, overnight in Seoul at a four-star hotel, plus all meals at the airline's expense, then continue the journey at noon next day. Excellent inflight service and no jet-lag on arrival.

RESORT

I do not stay at resorts, but having worked at Club Mediteranee in my younger days, it would be my choice for a plethora of activities from diving and tennis, to lectures and concerts.

LUGGAGE

I take a medium-size, lightweight Antler suitcase for the hold and a small Samsonite backpack as hand luggage.

ACCESSORY

I always pack a kanga, the cotton garment worn by women on the Swahili coast of Africa. Mine comes from Zanzibar. It can be worn as a sarong, used as a sheet, and wound turban-like around the head and stuffed with ice, it can offer some relief from a hangover.

NEXT ADVENTURE

I would like to revisit Djibouti, where I holidayed in 1965 to ride the old Franco-Ethiopian railway to Dire Dawa. And now that I am home, I would like to go to Darwin for some fishing and exploring the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road (Christine Osborne Pictures, $32.95 e-book, amazon.com via A Sense of Place Publishing.)

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